Thomas Gorges (1618 – 17 October 1670) was an English lawyer and politician who sat in the House of Commons between 1654 and 1660. He was a colonial governor of the Province of Maine from 1640 to 1643 and served as an officer in the Parliamentary Army during the English Civil War.
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Early life
Gorges was born in 1618 to Henry Gorges of Batcombe, Somerset and his wife Barbara Baynard, daughter of Thomas Baynard of Colerne, Wiltshire. He was a student of Lincoln's Inn in 1638.
Deputy governor of Maine
In 1640 Gorges was selected by his distant cousin, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, to be deputy governor of the Province of Maine in New England. The province was at the time a small number of sparsely populated communities in present-day southern Maine. Thomas was a Puritan, and established friendly relations with the nearby Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose governor John Winthrop described him as "sober and well-disposed". Gorges was responsible for establishing a stable government in Maine, something his relative William had been unable to do a few years earlier. Gorges' success at governance was somewhat short-lived. He departed the province in 1643 to fight in the English Civil War, and the province was eventually absorbed into Massachusetts, which also made territorial claims to the area.